Joschka Fischer, ex-Foreign Minister and strategist for the Greens, draws his lessons from the disastrous German mission in Afghanistan.
The Taliban ruled Afghanistan, and the food situation was terrible. Joschka Fischer was just 50 years old, Federal Foreign Minister and busy finding humanitarian solutions. Difficult in a closed country with terrorist training camps. “The newborns died like flies and so did the women and mothers, there was a famine every winter,” he says. None of that interested anyone at the time. Not in Germany, not even in the Bundestag. “The CNN Effect was non-existent”.